Diecast #376: Hyper Terra Ghost

Diecast – Twenty Sided

I intended to mention it on the show, but it slipped my mind: I actually have a new video coming out this week. Look for it tomorrow. It’s about boomer shooters. Or baby boomers. Or something like that.

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Hosts: Paul, Shamus. Episode edited by Issac.
Diecast376

Link (YouTube)

00:00 Terra Nil

Link (YouTube)

01:28 Stories that use Judeo-Christian ideas as worldbuilding details.

Oh no. Demons from a vaguely Biblical hell have entered our world. Again. Luckily, they seem to be vulnerable to swords / shotguns.

04:57 Ghostwire Tokyo

It’s not often that I get to say this, but I’ve honestly never seen anything like this before.

09:26:48 Hyperbolica

It’s not brilliant in terms of gameplay, but the non-Euclidian space really tickles my brain.

15:55 So many games!

Elden Ring, Tina’s Wonderland, Ghostwire Tokyo, Gran Turismo 7… a lot of big stuff came out this month!^[1]

18:26 The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

20:32 IXION & Startopia

What if we took an inherently fun and silly premise and took it super-seriously:

Link (YouTube)

23:18 The Next Major RTS Will Fail. This Is Why.

Brilliant analysis.

Link (YouTube)

31:11 MFA Redux: Updating Autopay

Why do they do this when there are better systems available?

33:56 OOP and PHP 8

I realize that the show notes this week are just a bunch of YouTube links, but here is one more:

CppCon 2014: Mike Acton “Data-Oriented Design and C++”

40:55 Mailbag: Protagonist Agency

Dear Diecast,

There was a lot of discussion on the blog over the past week about Protagonist vs. Main Character, and who is what, etc, Isn’t there an inherent problem with Video Games compared to other media in that the “Author” often doesn’t want the Main Character to have agency?

Although it doesn’t *have* to be this way, video game designers often choose to assign agency to other characters who tell the Main Character what to do. Shamus spoke of the player in NWN 2 as roleplaying the world’s biggest doormat. Gordon Freeman is constantly dictated to and doesn’t have an arc. The PC in WarCraft/StarCraft/C&C etc. is likewise a silent figure ordered around. MMOs are notorious for PCs barely being characters in the stories being told.

What would be the best games you can think of that *didn’t* go this route, and actually allow the player character to have agency in the game by not having an NPC order them around and that still told a good story at the end?

I guess mine would be Planescape -Torment.

44:55 Mailbag: The Game Theorists on Acti-Blizz Acquisition

Dear Diecast,

I hope you’re doing well! I remember Shamus talking about how he’s working on a piece about Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision-Blizzard. I recently saw this video that he could use as part of his research – it brings up some good points I see a lot of people overlooking – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt1utYXzKqM

Fair warning – it’s by Game Theory, which means it’s excessively aggressively annoying. But as much as I despise MattPatt’s style, he’s been in the consulting gig for quite a while, and in these sorts of topics he usually has something interesting to say (his recent piece about TwitchTV is also interesting).

As far as turning this into a question for the show… I guess this isn’t really a question. Maybe I should rename this email. Oh, no, wait – I do have a question: What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?!

Keep Being Awesome,
Lino

47:32 Mailbag: Presenting probabilities

Dear Diecast,

High-profile tactics games like XCOM and Civilization have found that if you tell players they are 80% to win something, then they will feel like they should win basically all of the time and complain that the numbers are off if they lose one out of five times. To solve this issue the games lie: if your actual chance is 80% the game reports it as 70% and this feels about right to people. Similarly if you’ve lost several times in a row the game will cheat and give you a bonus to break your losing streak because perfectly normal runs of bad luck make players complain that the dice are loaded against them.

How do you feel about this practice? Is there a better way to convey information, and if players are persistently bad at probability, should designers give them fake numbers that line up with their intuitions?

Ninety-Three percent to hit

Is there a term for when the GM has you roll for stupid stuff?

Player: (Half-joking) Okay, while these guys are talking my character is going to go outside and take a piss.

GM: (Not joking) Roll.

Player: I got a 1.

GM: You slipped and pissed all over yourself.

I’ve never encountered it personally, but I hear about this often enough in anecdotes that I wonder if there’s a term for it.